Chrome for Android Will Get Data Compression Similar to Amazon Silk and Opera Turbo

Mobile data transfer speeds are getting better these days, and I recently saw some news about 5G with Gbps speed being tested. But for now, developers are taking the help of data compression technologies to deliver web content on mobile browsers faster.

There is Opera Turbo. There is Amazon Silk. Chrome for Android is joining the league.

The team is working on this feature and will be introduced behind a flag named –enable-spdy-proxy-auth. From the looks of it, this feature is being developed Chrome for Android. But I won’t be surprised if this features lands on Chrome on desktops or Chromebooks.

So, what’s this feature? Here is how Amazon Silk and Opera Turbo, explained by Wiki.

For each webpage, Silk decides which browser subsystems (e.g. networking, HTML, page rendering) to run locally on the tablet and which to run remotely on the Amazon EC2 servers.Silk uses Google’s SPDY protocol to speed up the loading of web pages. Silk gives SPDY performance improvements for non-SPDY optimized websites if the pages are sent through Amazon’s servers.[citation needed] In real-world testing, several sites have recommended disabling cloud-based acceleration to improve page loading speed.

Now opera Turbo.

Just like Opera Mini, Opera Turbo requests normal Web content through a proxy. As opposed to the Opera Mini proxy, which uses the OBML format, the Web Optimization Proxy we are using will handle normal web content: markup, styles, JavaScript, images, etc. The proxy also uses the standard HTTP protocol with various optimizations to better utilize available bandwidth. And it is this bandwith save which will give you a speed increase. That means, the slower your network is, the bigger your gain is. But it will also mean that if you are on a fast brodband connection, it might not be any faster at all.

So in simple terms, Google servers will share half the work of your browser. Stay tuned for more updates on this feature.